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WAAAAHHH! my job is too hard!

Why Working at Starbucks for Three Weeks Was the Toughest Job I've Ever Had

A few months ago, I had the opportunity to work for Starbucks as a barista.

I had recently moved to New York City, and I was freelancing at the time. But I had to get a part-time job in order to pay next month’s rent. So one afternoon, I printed off a stack of resumes,and hand-delivered them to nearly 30 Starbucks in Lower Manhattan and one in Brooklyn.

Only one manager called me back: the one from Brooklyn, just a few blocks from my apartment — and the last store I visited. She offered me the job at $10/hour; and if I worked part-time for three months, I'd be eligible for health insurance.

I'd later find out that the store is located next to the busiest transit hub in Brooklyn, which makes it the busiest Starbucks outside of Manhattan. My initial idea of working a leisurely part-time job was completely false. This was going to be hard work. And a lot of it.

My first day was deceptively easy – watching videos of Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz on the store’s laptop with my fellow three trainees, and taste-testing coffee and tea. We had some pamphlets that explained the drinks, and our task was to memorize all of them — including some several dozen variations of shots, sizes and flavors.

We tried making a few of these with our trainers at the bar, but it wasn’t easy. There was usually a steady stream of 20-some people waiting in line, and there simply wasn’t the space or environment to train properly. It was always chaotic, with several people on the floor, calling orders, shifting from station to station, and asking you to get out of the way. Not to mention 10 customers waiting at the end of the bar for their drinks.

Photo: Daniel Goodman, Business Insider

My first real 7:30 a.m. shift was jarring. The intensity of what goes on behind the counter is simply not visible from the customer’s point of view. During the peak morning hours, we’d work through around 110 people every half hour with seven employees on the floor.

Since there was no chance my new colleagues — or “partners,” as Starbucks calls its employees — and I would ever memorize all the drinks, we handled everything else: brewing and changing coffees (staying on top of which ones are decaf, light and bold roasts, while rotating them via Starbucks’ “coffee cadence” using 2-minute timers and grinding the beans, having them all prepared to brew — and never leaving one pot sitting longer than 30 minutes without dumping, since it’s no longer “fresh”), marking drinks (there’s a complicated shorthand that you’ve got to memorize, while translating what a customer is saying into “Starbucks speak” and calling it properly), rotating pastries, the food case, and tossing hot items into the oven — all while managing the register.

Just as I was tempted to remind my coworkers that they were new once, too, I wanted to tell customers that I was way over-qualified for this job, and hoped they’d see me on the street in normal clothes, not in khakis, a black T-shirt, bright-green apron and baseball cap.

On my third day, my boss handed my fellow trainee — who would later disappear after a 10-minute break never to return — and me a mop and supplies to clean the bathroom, because the toilet was broken. It turned out not to be so horrible, but again, I quickly learned to swallow my pride.

We got two 10-minute breaks and one unpaid 30-minute break for every 8 hours on the floor, where we’d have to decide between running next door to use the restroom (because ours was always had a line of customers in front of it), quickly eating a bag lunch (there was never time to stand in line and buy something from the store), or making a cell phone call. If you’re lucky, you got to sit down on the one chair in the break room, or on the ladder, because there were never any open seats in the store.

Some of my coworkers were more demanding than others. Most were nice and welcoming. And there were office politics. On more than one occasion I walked into the break room to see someone crying, or talking about other coworkers. I mostly avoided this, until what would be my last week on the job.

I told my boss that I got a new, full-time job, and could work until I started at Business Insider. But the next day my name disappeared from the schedule.

For many people, service industry jobs are not a supplementary income or short-term solution. And hats off to them — especially those who do it without even complaining.

For much of my life I've had a white collar job, and a second service industry job.

The nice thing about the latter is this: It's about doing; not thinking, not planning, not strategizing; but doing. Busy day? Awesome, when I get out the time will have flown by. Pissy customers? Who gives a ****.

In my day job I'd be making management decisions that if I was wrong would hurt real people, shareholders, (including everyone who's 401k had invested in our company), employees (who's continued employment I was responsible for), etc.

If I could support myself being a barista, I'd happily do so. When the worst mistake you can make costs your company $5 or requires remaking a cup of coffee, then shut the **** up and do it.

This is why I have a hard time taking Occupy Lazy St. seriously: the droves of over-deucated, pampered, bratty fairness-warriors who don't understand that for 99% of every human to ever live in the history of humanity, life is a ****ing dog fight, sometimes against actual dogs, and just because a select few have managed to crawl up out of the muck and score a desk job doesn't mean there's a multi-national corporate conspiracy to fist **** you out of a raise. What do you think that malnourished ****er in the North Korean death camp would think about a $10/hr, 8-hr/day at Starbucks?

This is why I have a hard time taking Occupy Lazy St. seriously: the droves of over-deucated, pampered, bratty fairness-warriors who don't understand that for 99% of every human to ever live in the history of humanity, life is a ****ing dog fight, sometimes against actual dogs, and just because a select few have managed to crawl up out of the muck and score a desk job doesn't mean there's a multi-national corporate conspiracy to fist **** you out of a raise. What do you think that malnourished ****er in the North Korean death camp would think about a $10/hr, 8-hr/day at Starbucks?

For much of my life I've had a white collar job, and a second service industry job.

The nice thing about the latter is this: It's about doing; not thinking, not planning, not strategizing; but doing. Busy day? Awesome, when I get out the time will have flown by. Pissy customers? Who gives a ****.

In my day job I'd be making management decisions that if I was wrong would hurt real people, shareholders, (including everyone who's 401k had invested in our company), employees (who's continued employment I was responsible for), etc.

If I could support myself being a barista, I'd happily do so. When the worst mistake you can make costs your company $5 or requires remaking a cup of coffee, then shut the **** up and do it.

Exactly! I worked my ass off in the service industry throughout high school and parts of college but it was a time I look back on fondly and my worst day was taking a bunch of **** from a customer I soon forgot about. Being busy always seemed to make the days go by quickly. Seems she went in to her job search believing part time meant collecting a check and doing nothing - where does that come from? Since when is work supposed to be easy? Its not like she is banging nails in construction all day and I know a LOT of jobs much tougher than serving coffee.

Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. ~Elvis

Good point. Put in 6 months doing roofing or construction or bailing hay and then come tell me about Starbucks again. There's a whole show called Dirty Jobs that teenagers should be forced to watch before issuing a complaint. There's also this whole thing called 3/4ths of the world that lives in slums and shanty towns and works in mines and sweat lodges for a few dollars and some rice, and are happy to have it.

When I finished my undergrad degree I didn't feel like going to a technical school or getting a further degree right away. So I got a job in the construction industry with someone I knew, worked my balls off 60+ hours per week. I needed to prove to myself that I could do it. Also, making some money instead of racking up debt was pretty nice, I have to admit.

Anyway, the powers that be recognized I wasn't afraid of hard work, and guess what.....3 years later I'm running a division of the company (granted, it's a small company) and making more than probably 95% of the people I graduated University with. Did I get lucky? Maybe. But I certainly put myself in a position that when luck was around, I was going to damn well be in the running for it.